Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @03:58PM
from the where-are-you-planning-on-driving-exactly dept.

Ransak writes "As we hear more and more about dashboard cameras catching unplanned events, I've thought of equipping my vehicles with them just in case that 'one in a billion' moment happens. But given the level ofoverreach law enforcement has shown, I'd only consider one if I could be assured that the data was secure from prying eyes (e.g., a camera that writes to encrypted SD memory). Are there any solutions for the niche market of the paranoid photographer/videographer?"

Are there any solutions for the niche market of the paranoid photographer/videographer?"

Why yes, yes there is. It's called building it yourself. While encryption isn't illegal, you may have noticed despite the obvious benefits and lack of drawbacks to the consumer, it isn't found pretty much anywhere. This is deliberate: Various law enforcement agencies that don't want to be found out make backroom deals to keep companies from providing this most useful of features because it would make their job more difficult. Or at least, so they say. In truth, they just want access to "ALL THE THINGZ!" regardless of whether there's a legitimate judiciary need for it. And encryption means they'd have to serve warrants and stuff to get the keys, not just go clandestine copy-pasta on your personal data.

So your niche market isn't niche at all -- it would already be out there, if not for the authoritarian governments of the world (I'm looking at you "free" western society). Now with that out of the way, you can roll your own easily. Embedded devices with a USB connector and linux are a dime a dozen, and most sport the ability to store data to an SD or CF card, as well as boot off of them. It's possible to create one-way encryption so something can be written to using a public key, but only decrypted using a private key not located on the same physical device. This would provide you with a tamper-evident system, and simultaniously provide full protection for your privacy; You can't recover the data without the key, and the data cannot be modified without it either.

No. There's not a substantial market for it. The market is for things that make it _easier_ for people to post every last second of their lives online (Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instragram, Youtube, etc). The vast majority of the public will see encryption or anything else that interferes with instant narcissism as broken.

No. There's not a substantial market for it. The market is for things that make it _easier_ for people to post every last second of their lives online (Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instragram, Youtube, etc). The vast majority of the public will see encryption or anything else that interferes with instant narcissism as broken.

Amazon [amazon.com] says "No." There is a growing market for dashboard cameras. And they're cheap. Really cheap. Forbes [forbes.com] even published an article last month suggesting that they may become mandatory on new cars. As far as people posting "every last second of their lives online." You should really google "russian dash camera". They love posting those things online. It's quite the rage right now. No sir, you are dead wrong.

The market is very much alive and growing fast. And nowhere is "instant narcissism" listed in the reasons people are buying them. Security. Safety. Documenting scams people try to pull (Drive a nice car? Got nice insurance. Target for a personal injury scam). Documenting the police "No officer, I wasn't speeding, and this GPS-enabled dash cam proves it." The only "instant narcissism" I see is from a jaded troll on slashdot going for extra karma by dragging in a favorite scratching post for the slashkiddies: Hipsters. And hey, while I appreciate the sentiment, you're just flat wrong here.

I'm pretty certain he was only referring to the encryption part as a "niche market" or as interference with "instant narcissism". Most of your reply instead assumes he was talking about dashboard cameras in general, making the last line of your comment pretty extra unfriendly. You're a nice person, girlintraining, and I like your posts, but I think you misread his post and a personal attack is unnecessary.

I think thesandbender was referring to the lack of market for ubiquitous encryption, not dash cameras.

With the growing number of cases of seizure of cameras and recording devices by police, I think the need for something like this exists, even if people don't realize it. I would add one feature: authorized write-access. It would be nice if someone couldn't maliciously delete the contents.

Would a WiFi SD card to a laptop in the car do the same job? I don't know whether those SD cards store stuff permanently or just long enough to transmit it. Or maybe it's configurable to erase after transmission?

Would a WiFi SD card to a laptop in the car do the same job? I don't know whether those SD cards store stuff permanently or just long enough to transmit it. Or maybe it's configurable to erase after transmission?

Besides the major article on Slashdot just this week about how those cards are so exploitable it makes Java look like Fort Knox, sure. Great idea! One problem: The dude asked for an encrypted storage device. People who ask for things like this generally are against the idea of wirelessly broadcasting their personal data.

Dude asked for a way to keep the data encrypted when 'stored'. If it's simply broadcast to a secured storage medium and not stored or not stored very long, i.e. the laptop, it still meets the criteria. The cop isn't going to be able to wirelessly grab what was sent 20 minutes ago.

The reason that there isn't encryption in camcorders is not because of authoritarian governments Encryption is not illegal, Camcorders are not illegal. There is no reason that a company could not make such a device and sell it in the western world.
In fact, COTS encrypted USB thumb drives are used by defense contractors to encrypt sensitive data all the time.

The reason that there isn't encryption in camcorders is because it would be more expensive and there isn't a large demand for such a device. It is p

So your niche market isn't niche at all -- it would already be out there, if not for the authoritarian governments of the world (I'm looking at you "free" western society).

No, the niche market truly is niche, otherwise it would be available. There are three reasons it is not, and only one of them has anything to do with any government.

Munitions regulations. Anyone selling strong encryption devices needs to worry about export/import. This makes the market smaller automatically, since it can no longer be a worldwide device, it must either be limited in scope or multiple versions must be sold.

"Dear, what was the password we put on the pictures of the grandkids again? What do y

If you knew it would arrive, might even be better to send it to various vid sites starting maybe with YouTube and the like, or to public page of one or more of the social sites where you might have membership.

Because you might find yourself in a jurisdiction that can jail you for not either handing over the decryption key or, perhaps, being allowed to decrypt it yourself.

Encryption being on, or not on, devices is not because of any kind of backroom dealings and is all up to what a company feels it useful, and what they want to spend on it. There are popular devices out there with very good, as in the police can't bypass it, encryption. You can do it on an Android phone, the full device encryption is extremely robust. It is just a pain in the butt to use so most don't.

When a company considers providing encryption, and in what capacity, there is a few things they have to eval

Are there any solutions for the niche market of the paranoid photographer/videographer?

Why yes, yes there is. It's called building it yourself. While encryption isn't illegal, you may have noticed despite the obvious benefits and lack of drawbacks to the consumer, it isn't found pretty much anywhere.

I think you mean "utter lack of benefits and significant drawbacks". I'm a photographer, and there's pretty much zero benefit to encrypting my work, and the risk of losing everything forever because I forget th

Hmm, an SD card plugged into your camera, sticking out in plain view, with nothing on it. A second card, installed under the dash, that does the recording. "Why no, officer, I don't believe the camera was turned on".

If you have a video camera constantly recording on your car dash you are going to end up recording a traffic offense you have committed (unless you never commit any of course, but most people make the occasional mistake). Not wanting a police officer who pulls you over for fun to be able to access the video and look for such cases doesn't seem like that strange a desire.

Looking good in a court of law isn't the issue, it's not getting there in the first place. Though I can't help but notice that the amazing

they can keep you in indefinitely for forgetting the password. RIPA allows for this. It's the ONLY Act that allows for this - although, it is being challenged, as it falls foul of the "cruel and unusual punishment" bit in the ECHR. It also falls foul of the double punishment rule, in that you can't be legally punished twice for the same crime, they get around that by saying that repeated contempt is not the same crime.

This sounds like an excellent opportunity for a tiny computer like an arduino or raspberry pi or the like. Just plug the camera into one and have it periodically offload the pictures from the camera, encrypt them, and dump them to a hard drive in the trunk. Once there, they can be deleted from the camera itself. In fact, you could probably just use a webcam and ditch the on-camera storage altogether.

Take something like this shield [seeedstudio.com], and then connect the camera's SDCard socket to the arduino on 6 of the GPIO lines. (The shield uses the SPI interface.) Read/write speed may be a factor though, due to using serial bitbash mode to read and write to the card over SPI.

This would let you add encryption functionality to any SDcard capable device that doesn't currently support it. Putting a buffer lytic cap on, and a voltage regulator would let you tap the camera's

Do you want to prevent anyone from accessing the information without your approval or are you merely concerned about the device being physically confiscated? If it's the latter, how about just streaming the audio/video to remote storage?

I wouldn't assume you'd have good enough wireless connection for that. A second step to off-site it certainly is a reasonable feature, but encrypt it first so you at least 'have' it.

That said, having your laptop serve as a local WiFi and using one of those WiFi SD cards...do they store the data and keep it stored or just long enough to transmit it? That might solve the problem entirely since the laptop certainly will be capable of being encrypted well enough to protect from usage and the SD card is bla

Partition a 64GB card with a 2GB partition on it, with a FAT32 filesystem and maybe a bunch of street maps. Put a label on the card that says 2GB. Record encrypted data to raw unpartitioned disk space past 2GB. Bonus points for hacking the firmware on the SD card so that it normally shows up as a 2GB card unless a special code is sent to it.

The only actual solution is to stream the video to off-site hosted storage, preferably in an inconvenient foreign jurisdiction. If it's stored on the device, it's subject to seizure - whether encrypted or not. Losing the video is often worse than having it viewed by someone against your will. And rest assured, if you record something really bad, there's a good chance someone will destroy the recording device (whether the perpetrator is government or non-government).

As cybernetic implants become reality, its only a matter of time before someone embeds local storage in their body. Imagine a cochlear implant with onboard, encrypted storage. Pretty hard for current LEO tech to deal with.

I would get the Eye-Fi, an Android MP3 player with WiFi & bluetooth, and set up the wireless card access to it. Using a USB 12V regulator to keep it powered, and a volume encryption for the SD card in the player. That way you can tuck it away under the seat, glove box, or somewhere it won't be seen. They might check your cell phone for files, but it won't be there.

This setup comes with the side benefit that you can sound cool at the same time, if your car has blue-tooth audio, or a blue-tooth/FM tran

The scenario I'm more interested in is having a camera running at all times that catch the various idiot drivers all over the place. Hit a button and the last 5 minutes and anything until the next press are permanently stored. Then send the file to the traffic cops.

The challenge is making the video admissible in court with sufficient weight to be enough to actually convict somebody of the traffic violation they're on tape performing. Currently "we" consider a cops' word as overwhelming evidence in such a case, with police dashboard cameras being a "bonus".

If there's some way to ensure that *I* don't tamper with the recording at a level that the courts would trust, I'd install one in a heartbeat.

Given how much "revenue" city police get from traffic violations, I'd think they'd be all for this. Get the population that's fed up with jackass drivers to buy and install cameras that do the cops' job for them in court, bringing in additional fines without adding more traffic cops.

I think the OP wants to have the data encrypted so that in the event he inadvertently captures video that could implicate himself in a crime (e.g. speeding, running a red light, etc), that this information can only be unencrypted and accessed with his consent if the data is confiscated.

I think the best solution (although I am not sure if this product exists), is an SD card that has hardware encryption built in to it. This would be ideal because it wouldn't require the camcorder to know anything about the e

I have a camera built into the front license plate bracket rather than sitting on the dashboard. This particular one has the recording device elsewhere on the vehicle, but I suspect with today's technology the entire thing could fit in the license plate bracket. Just sayin'.

SD card stands for Secure Digital card. it's called Secure Digital because the card includes onboard circuitry to do encryption. That encryption hasn't yet been broken. It can be used either to passphrase protect the card, or for DRM on preloaded cards.

Most cameras don't have a keyboard to enter the password of course, so use an old phone as a camera. Some phones support locking and unlocking the card with a passphrase.

Yes and no. Not every device that uses (micro)SD cards can do encryption, and not every card that's the shape and size of a (micro)SD card is necessarily a real (micro)SD card that supports encryption. Remember, SD is a superset of MMC, and 99% of devices that don't support encryption really just treat the "(micro)SD" card like a MMC card.

I believe that in the US, anybody can read and write (micro)SD using the 1-bit MMC-compatible SPI interface without encryption royalty-free, but if you want to either use its built-in encryption or communicate in 4-bit mode, you have to pay royalties and obtain a license to use the superset of capabilities that (micro)SD adds to MMC.

I thought he was clear on the problem that encryption solves: the level of overreach law enforcement....assured that the data was secure from prying eyes

He wasn't looking for a solution to prevent him from throwing away an SD card that he recorded his encrypted steam to - how is that even a problem? I have a flash drive right here with gigabytes of encrypted data and I haven't thrown it away because it contains gigabytes of encrypted data.

He doesn't throw the card away. The "prying eyes" do. If his car gets searched and they confiscate the contents of his car. It's very easy for an SD card to go missing or get formatted.

Then problem solved, right? He's looking for protection from having his own evidence used against him.

If the police are searching his car and seizing SD cards, I don't think they are going to casually steal the card and format it. If they are searching the car, the card (and everything in the car) is evidence and it will be bagged and stored with the rest of the evidence, and possible will undergo forensic analysis if they think there's useful data on it. Even if they don't know the data is encrypted, when

Not really. He never mentioned why he exactly wanted it to be encrypted. It also deletes the evidence of the police doing something wrong. What if it was a cop that ran the red light but said it was you? What if you pull up and see a cop beating someone?

Not really. He never mentioned why he exactly wanted it to be encrypted. It also deletes the evidence of the police doing something wrong. What if it was a cop that ran the red light but said it was you? What if you pull up and see a cop beating someone?

He said he wants to record video but keep it safe from prying eyes, doesn't that say exactly why he wants to encrypt it?

He said nothing about wanting to keep it safe from confiscation or destruction by the police, that's a much different problem that isn't solved by encryption - he just doesn't want them to be able to view the video.

So what the query really is, "I want a camera that I can use when the accident is someone else's fault and I can pretend doesn't exist when the accident is my fault?". After all the cameras only record a certain amount of time and then overwrite previously recorded video, hence there isn't much worry for loss of privacy.

So what the query really is, "I want a camera that I can use when the accident is someone else's fault and I can pretend doesn't exist when the accident is my fault?". After all the cameras only record a certain amount of time and then overwrite previously recorded video, hence there isn't much worry for loss of privacy.

Exactly - what's wrong with that? If the other guy wants a camera to prove it's my fault, let him get his own camera, don't expect me to use my camera to prove my own guilt.

But even if the camera only records 30 minutes or an hour of video, there are still privacy concerns. If I'm in an accident 30 minutes after a quick romp on the hood of my car with my mistress, I sure don't want my wife seeing that video when they play it back in court.

When I drive there are two cases where I break the law. Those that are fully planed and rationalized, such as driving slightly over the speed limit but with the flow of traffic. For these I stand up and say "dam right I did it"

That's going to work only if the justice system is... you know... just. Which it isn't. Since the times of Cardinal Richelieu at least. You probably broke some law today before you got out of the bed.

Either it isn't thought through, or it is chimera. The thing is if you what you are worried about it corrupt cop does something you record, they stop you, and take the recording away, encryption does fuck-all to stop that. The cops steal the gear, that is that.

The solution to that is a backup, or a fake item. A setup where the obvious camera isn't the one that records, or that there is a second SD card elsewhere that has a copy or something.

Encryption is only useful if he wants to be able to cover his tracks, and selectively release video. This is precisely what corrupt police like to do with their dash cams. They use them to protect themselves, but turn them off or "lose" the video when they are breaking the law.

So to me it implies that he probably like breaking traffic law, and doesn't want the evidence of that around, but still wants to be able to record things.

Encryption is only useful if he wants to be able to cover his tracks, and selectively release video.

...or have an officer believe "This is not evidence that can be used against me." Count yourself lucky that you don't have enough experience with corrupt police officers to understand how they operate.

"I was recorded committing a crime, but I can use as much force as I want without any consequences in order to change how much evidence becomes available to prosecutors, who are mostly my buddies. Plus, my partner has been inculcated to back me up on anything and everything with a straight face. If I fire my gun, though, there's going to be a hell of a lot of paperwork."

ok.1. The Police can, sans warrant, only seize items that are reasonably thought to have been used in the COMMISSION OF A CRIME. For example, firearms.2. The Police have NO RIGHT to take private property just because they want to.3. "Just Cause" is NOT a justification for seizure.4. The Police have NO RIGHT to demand that you incriminate yourself by turning over materials. EVER.5. The Police have NO RIGHT to search you or your property for evidence without a specified WARRANT. PERIOD.

#1: Argue that at the point of a gun... or with 5-15 cops "talking" to you (Hint: You will lose)
#2: Once you "lose" control of your SD card (given to - or - taken by the officer)... it magically becomes erased with the images that were important.

I would think... is there someway to have a camera with 2 SD cards, one hidden?... Wifi xfer images to a hidden system in the 'car' or in a backpack {yours or that of a friend}?

The new (and maybe old) Hero cameras have a WiFi link off camera that I believe can be used to capture video. Put a small SD card in the camera and either let it fill up or forget to turn on the record video mode...

All that sounds great in the classroom/laboratory, but in the street it's pure bullshit. The cops can and will do want they want any time they think they will get away with it, including rape [cbslocal.com]. and the biggest lie they continue to tell is that it's not systematic. Well, it is, and the only anomaly is getting caught.

5. The Police have NO RIGHT to search you or your property for evidence without a specified WARRANT. PERIOD.

You seem to be misinformed. They can search your vehicle during a traffic stop if they have probable cause [wikipedia.org]. This can also be grounds for forcibly entering you home if they have cause to believe you are holding someone hostage, etc. Unfortunately probable cause can be very easy to abuse.

"Also, in some states it is a crime to record an on-duty police officer without their permission."

No, it isn't.

This has been tried in a relatively few states, and while at first some judges were cooperative with the police, eventually in every state where it has been tried so far it has been thrown out of court.

It is now a pretty well-established principle that if something is occurring in public, you can film it. Even if it's cops doing it. Almost anything that occurs on the street, in fact, plus anywhere else public. Even backcountry roads.

People have a RIGHT to film the police doing their taxpayer-funded jobs in public. Period.

Recently some cops tried a new twist on this idea. They claimed that filming was okay, but that recording audio at the same time was "illegal surveillance" under their states' "all-party consent" law. (I.e., in some states, all parties have to consent before a phone conversation, for example, can be legally recorded.)

If the police are searching his car and seizing SD cards, I don't think they are going to casually steal the card and format it.

If the police are searching the car, then everything they remove will go into an evidence bag for later examination, including the camera and the SD card. Before examination, the SD card will certainly be duplicated so that any changes that accessing the card while studying it can be accounted for, and an exact duplicate can be provided to the defense if necessary.

If the camera is a commercial product, then the police will contact the manufacturer to find out what the data format is when they cannot read

"If the police are searching the car, then everything they remove will go into an evidence bag for later examination, including the camera and the SD card. Before examination, the SD card will certainly be duplicated so that any changes that accessing the card while studying it can be accounted for, and an exact duplicate can be provided to the defense if necessary."

Unless the card contains evidence of cops abusing their power. In which case... what card? They never found any card. Or, as you point out, the

"11th circuit court of appeals ruled that you *CANNOT* compel somebody to decrypt their HD."

There is a caveat, however. This is only true if it is NOT known in advance whether there is specific illegal material contained in the encrypted data.

In another case, Customs (apparently randomly) searched a man who was coming back into the United States. His laptop was turned on but asleep, and an encrypted volume was active and accessible. Two Customs agents saw child pornography among the encrypted data, before the man (I don't know how) managed to switch the computer off. When the computer was started back up again, the encrypted data was not accessible without a password.

In this case, the court ruled that the man could be compelled to supply the password, because it was already known that specific illegal material was contained in the encrypted data. (With a certain measure of reliability. After all, two agents testified to seeing that material, AND if that turned out not to be the case when the data was accessed, two Customs agents would no doubt lose their jobs, to say the least. Maybe get sued or be prosecuted as well.)

The lesson here is: be sure your decryption is turned off.

There's more, though: another circuit court recently ruled firmly that even at the border, agents of the government must have probable cause to conduct a search. So the random searches they were doing are no longer kosher. (They never were, really, but they were getting away with it.)

I have a dashboard camera and had similar thoughts about the encryption. I don’t care to stream the video somewhere else -- this is not my concern, I just don’t want the video to end up in the hands that I didn’t approve. Current cameras store several hours of most recent footage and even if I decide to share the last 5 minutes, who knows what could be there during previous hours if my card is copied in full.

Even if the camera manufacturers are not making the camera with built-in encryption, having a public-key encryption can be achieved on a separate tiny device. With current technology the device could have a form-factor of an SD-card. Imagine you have an SD card to which you record a public-key. Every following write to the card will be done through a built-in encryption using that key. All reads will return the encrypted content and it will appear as garbage. But for the purpose of most cameras (that only need to be able to read directories and file names) this will work. If the device is not as small as the SD card, I’d be ok to have wires sticking out of the SD slot that go to my “encryptor”. I can totally see such card to be useful for general photography too.

In the US at least, the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court IIRC) have ruled that law enforcement can't legally force you to provide access to your encrypted data (thanks to a little thing called the 5th amendment)

Police routinely destroy, delete, edit and/or obfuscate footage when it shows them in an "unflattering" light, why do you expect everyday citizens to turn over evidence against themselves when the police fail to do the same?

Or say to like a laptop which is then encrypted. I'm not sure about dashboard cams but some cameras offer wifi, which works like take the picture > send the picture > delete the picture. Not sure about a stream though. It would obviously require a lot more resources, but I'm sure an N network could handle it.

Too much work, too hard to insure you always have a signal. The answer to this one is actually pretty simple...carputer. You can either DIY with one of several kits or a friend of mine has made a good living installing mini-HTPC boxes based on Bobcat chips in trunks, its really not hard and these chips are ultra low power so its not a drain. Add an SSD using Truecrypt and voila! The cops pull the plug to get the SSD out and all they have is a brick without your Truecrypt password. There are plenty of little 5 inch touchscreens you can mount in the front so you can input your password as you are starting up and if you decide you want to keep anything you recorded 5 minutes with a portadrive and Bob's your uncle.

This ask Slashdot frankly ain't hard, hand me $600 plus the cost of the parts and I can have it done over a weekend, going DIY if you don't have exp in this kind of deal will take a little longer but if you can follow instructions and use basic common sense? Really not that hard. You can go wireless to the carputer (costs more) or you can run the wires around the door frames (cheaper but more of a PITA) to the cameras and an AMD bobcat with a stripped down OS like Win 7 Tiny or Puppy Linux can easily record a couple of cameras no problem, its a 1.7GHz dual core after all. So its really not hard, just takes a little time and depending on how fancy he wants to get it can cost anywhere from $500-$1500, price depending on how many cams, the quality, what kind of extra features like being able to playback video or surf on the carputer, etc.

Too much work, too hard to insure you always have a signal. The answer to this one is actually pretty simple...carputer. You can either DIY with one of several kits or a friend of mine has made a good living installing mini-HTPC boxes based on Bobcat chips in trunks, its really not hard and these chips are ultra low power so its not a drain. Add an SSD using Truecrypt and voila! The cops pull the plug to get the SSD out and all they have is a brick without your Truecrypt password. There are plenty of little 5 inch touchscreens you can mount in the front so you can input your password as you are starting up and if you decide you want to keep anything you recorded 5 minutes with a portadrive and Bob's your uncle.

How do you handle the power getting shut off to the CPU several times a day as the car is driven? You can't let it run all the time, it may be "low power", but it's not "no power". If you wait 10 - 20 seconds for it to boot every time you start up the car, then you miss the video of me having some car slam into me when I'm pulling out of the driveway.

Deep cycle battery and a split-charging relay. If I'm leaving the vehicle parked up for more than a day or so, I'll just power all the computery stuff off.

A Bobcat E-350 system including power supply is going to draw around 16 watts when idle, so figure 1.5 amp @ 12V. If you want it to last a day or so (2 days?) you'll need a 72 Amp-hour battery, but you won't want to discharge it too deeply, so let's go with a 90 amp-hour battery to be safe. So you're talking about a $200, 70 lb battery that's bigger than your car battery just to keep this thing powered for 2 days. That's a lot of extra weight to carry around just to run a camera.

I'm pretty sure you could do some suspend magic to make it draw less power, and I can't really think of any reason why you'd need to have it sitting idle-but-powered with the engine off for more than a couple of hours.

A 90Ah battery is fairly small and inexpensive, and certainly smaller than the existing battery in my car. It's certainly not heavy, compared to the rest of the stuff I carry about - I'm not sure what an "lb" is but the 110Ah battery for the car is about 30kg.

Presumably you would have to enter your passphrase before recording can commence. Thus, you enter the passphrase before backing out of the driveway. With a "carputer" you may be able to enter the passphrase over bluetooth or wifi from your smartphone.

Though a small screen with some beeps reminding you to enter the passphrase each time the car was turned on would help you do it every time. Might have BT turned off on your phone and thus not get the notification.

Who wants to enter a 20 character password every time you start your car? Just use public key cryptography to encrypt the data in the car, and keep your private key somewhere safe where you can decrypt the video.

Not if you don't store it on the device - with public key cryptography you can encrypt with your public key (and you can give that public key to the world), but only your private key can decrypt, which you've stored someplace safe.

You can't be compelled to produce a 'password' or combination, but you can be compelled to produce a physical key to a safe, or for instance your fingerprint to unlock your fingerprint encrypted laptop.

Does this 'private key' count as a password or a key from a legal perspective?

That sounds like a distinction between the authentication concepts of "what you are" (fingerprint, retina scan, dna) "what you have" (physical key, smartcard) vs "what you know" (password).

I'd have a feeling that it would come down to a "reasonable person" standard. For example, would a reasonable person be able to memorize a 2048 bit RSA key? If not, then that key goes from being something you know to something you have.

Ultimately that would be up to the courts to decide, but in my objective opinion, that'

Depends. Maybe the private key is a hash of, say, the US Constitution. My knowledge of encryption is pretty much non-existent, so I'm afraid I do not know how public/private keys are generated, and if it is possible to take a given private key and work backwards to produce a public key.

If not, then that key goes from being something you know to something you have.

But its location is a "something you know". If you are arrested while carrying a set of physical keys, is it ok for you to remain silent on what each key goes to? If so, I would think that it should also be ok for you to

in the United States, you cannot be compelled to incriminate yourself, that's true enough. It used to be the same in Britain as well, until recently: precedent has it that someone was ordered by the Court to divulge a password to her laptop. She said she couldn't remember. She was sent to prison "until her memory improves".

She spent fourteen months inside.

No, I don't have a citation. Just something I'm hearing of more and more. Britain is setting a fine example as a Constitutional Monarchy*/Republic*/Democr

If in the United States, the answer is universally "NO". Decryption cannot be mandated. There have been a couple close calls over the years under some unusual circumstances, but the general principle stands.

I'd rather use HTTP PUT to store the files. I'd rather it just delete from the upload directory as soon as encryption is done. I'd rather use a file system with a security erase feature. I'd rather then further upload the encrypted directory to my server instance which allows some otner server instances elsewhere to pull the files, without any logging.

yes, something small LIKE the raspberry Pi, but something that has enough power to encode and encrypt a real time video stream. I don't think rPI has hardware assisted encryption or encoding, so I doubt it could do the job.

The video camera for the Raspberry Pi is reported to be able to record 1080p at 30 frames/second:

I don't know if there's enough left over to do encryption at the same time, but maybe you could cut the frame rate in half and record 15 frames/second to allow more time for encryption. 15fps (or 1 frame eery 66ms) is probably good enough for a car cam.